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Planet is a trade hub, a crossroads in warpspace for several planets. It has a strong-ish fleet that keeps order in the sector's local space, with a few space stations and small fleet of patrolling ships. The planet's surface is almost entirely covered in a storm of black gas that stretches into the atmosphere, save for a small continent-sized area which is habitable for life and agriculture. The vast majority of the planet's population lives in this clearing, with some industrial outposts a short distance into the storm mining valuable resources. Over half the population lives in a giant megacity and its surrounding suburbs, where trade ships bring goods and do business. The rest of the clearing consists of farms and manufacturing sites which support the city. So the planet has 4 distinct "sites". The city center, the suburbs, the small towns, and the outposts. The city center is where it all happens. There's ports with ships coming and going 24/7; there's businesses; there's clubs and restaurants; there's big markets. It's a whole world. People live their entire lives without leaving the city. There's maybe a half dozen big ports where ships can land and exit the planet. Real estate around these ports is all businesses and super rich people, where commerce never stops. Other regions of the city vary in wealth and function. Some are down-sized versions of the commerce centers, some are vast swaths of warehouses and storage, some are middle class apartments and offices, few are poor because the real estate is so valuable. Travel and traffic runs primarily through a vast network of tunnels and hyperloops, with flight reserved for the business class. The majority of the suburb regions are poor, with shitty labor economies. Many of these places are defacto ghettos, with heavy police presence and controlled entry and exit. A few places are quite wealthy, containing the corporate campuses and housing of companies which operate the farms and industrial sites in the rural outlands. The business people live here and have comfortable amenities, away from the gritty work sites the companies manage remotely. Other parts of the suburbs exist purely for transit of material into and out of the city. These areas hold massive train stations, sending in food and manufactured products, and sending out garbage. These rail lines are like spokes radiating out into the planet's clearing. They are connected by a "rail ring" which loops around the city; raw materials received on one side of the city will go around the ring, sent off to a factory, then return to the city. The rail lines stop a distance from the city center, and distribution is routed through the tunnels or streets. The outlands are very sparsely populated. The land is covered with hyper-efficient farms. There's a few parks, but almost everything that isn't a farm is a factory. Most people live in on-site housing where they work, in small company towns. The facilities make heavy use of automation, but still require many humans. Farming companies monitor their fields with drones and satellites to spot trespassers; security patrols in flying cars are occasionally needed to arrest campers/squatters or people taking the crops. The outlands also have resorts and parks people go to for vacation. They range from simply nice to opulent. Forests and "wild"life (engineered) are maintained here like gardens. Some wealthy people in the businesses operating in the outlands live in reclusive estates in sprawling forests. The outlands also hold a few destroyed cities. These were built in the pre-Scream era. After the Scream, the primary city destroyed them to take power over the planet. The megacity was the biggest before the Scream, but not nearly as big as it is now. These other cities were potential competitors and rivals. With them destroyed, the megacity controlled the whole planet. In the present day, classes and communities low on the social hierarchy are descendents from these cities, ethnically, religiously, or otherwise. The ethnic group which lived in the megacity, but hailed from the second biggest city, they were mostly all killed in a genocide following the cities' destruction. This all happened centuries ago, but still has shaped present-day society. These cities are ruins now, and habitation of them is prohibited. Military outposts are held there, simply to keep squatters from settling them. There's been a few cases of criminals on the run trying to hide in the ruins, but they are usually hunted down by the soldiers. Maximum security prisons are located in the ruins; most criminals are put to work as peasants or slaves, but some are kept in these prisons. These ruins and the military outposts held there act as forward bases for the megacity to exert authority over the outlands. Force is rarely ever necessary, primarily because these bases prevent the outlands from growing in power, independence, and organization. However, military personel don't want to hold these posts, because the city posts are more prestigious and have better quality of life. Smuggling and other organized crime are known to operate in the bases, and the soldiers there have some resentment of their peers in the megacity. The outposts in the storm are all mining operations; the geology and atmospheric activity of the storm is responsible for valuable resource deposits. Visibility in the storm is no more than 50 meters, 100 with advanced scanning and wireless devices. The particulate matter of the storm makes wireless communication and scanning extremely difficult. When a mining base is well-established transport is done underground; too much cargo is moved for trucks, and surface rail lines would be disrupted and buried in the storm. The settlement process takes years, relying on caravans of massive slow trucks to support construction of the underground rail line. Sites tend to be branch off from each other; a rail line and tunnel is already constructed, operations already in full swing in the area, so companies will prospect for new sites nearby rather than in some random area. This has formed pseudo "capital" and "suburb" bases, where most sites are small and their tunnels merge with the initial founding, large sites. The mining sites themselves are all underground, including most of the living space. There are huge open caverns, with tall buildings and an almost-urban sprawl. There are networks of windowless interiors built into the earth, rooms connected by corridors and elevators. All light is artificial, with no shared day/night schedule. The living conditions mostly are not so terrible. Areas can be kept pretty clean if one is diligent about it, but the default is for things to become dirty very quickly. There's restaurants and cafes and bars, some of them decent. Some mining sites, or parts of mining sites, are gulags for criminals and political prisoners, conditions just enough for the workers to stay alive and efficient. In all mining sites, loss of power, transportation, or life support is a lingering fear. Disease outbreak can quickly infect a whole site if it's not caught immediately; at that point, the whole site will be quarantined. Expenses to heal the sick and keep the site alive will usually be spent, but gulag sites will usually be cut off until both the infection and the workers die out. A particularly disastrous scenario would be for an infection to break out in a hub site, because all sites operating on the downstream transit lines would be shut down in the ensuing quarantine. Category:Browse